1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an image compression apparatus and method that measures the distance to a subject when capturing an image.
2. Description of the Related Art
Various techniques have been developed to impart presence to moving image data.
Presence can be imparted to moving image data by, for example, reproducing a three-dimensional image.
A three-dimensional image may be generated by, for example, acquiring two image data of the same subject from the viewpoints of the left and right eyes. When reproducing the three-dimensional image data, the image data for the left eye is to be viewed by the left eye while the image data for the right eye is to be viewed by the right eye. Hereinafter, image data acquired from the viewpoints of the left and right eyes are referred to as “parallax images”.
The simplest way to generate parallax images is to install two cameras at positions corresponding to the left and right eyes to capture two images. However, it takes significant effort and cost to capture images using this method. Therefore, a technique for generating three-dimensional image data on the basis of two-dimensional moving image data acquired with a single camera has been desired.
In order to generate three-dimensional image data on the basis of a single two-dimensional image, two parallax images are generated from the single two-dimensional image.
In order to generate two parallax images from a single two-dimensional image, distance information indicating the distance to each subject in the two-dimensional image data has been used to date.
To obtain the distance information, a human may view an image to estimate the distance from the viewpoint (camera position), at which the image was captured, to the subject. Disadvantageously, however, it may be difficult to automate this scheme, since a human estimates the distance.
Therefore, there has been desired a technique for automatically measuring the distance to a subject when generating a two-dimensional image.
Japanese Unexamined Patent Application Publication No. Hei 08-70473 (JP-A-Hei 08-70473) discloses a technique for automatically measuring the distance to a subject when generating a single two-dimensional image to provide image data with distance information.